The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo #5)(17)

I imagined a caravan of shiny black SUVs full of Germani roaring toward us, encircling our location to take us into custody. If Nero had indeed seen what had happened on that rooftop, it was only a matter of time. We’d given him quite a show. He would want our autographs, followed by our heads on a silver plate.

At the corner of Eighty-First and First, I scanned the traffic. No sign of Germani yet. No monsters. No police or civilians screaming that they’d just witnessed a Gaulish warrior fall from the sky.

“What now?” I asked, really hoping Meg had an answer.

From her belt pouches, Meg fished out the item Lu had given her: a shiny golden Roman coin. Despite everything we’d just been through, I detected a gleam of excitement in my young friend’s eyes.

“Now I summon a ride,” she said.

With a cold flush of dread, I understood what she was talking about. I realized why Luguselwa had given her that coin, and part of me wished I had thrown the Gaul a few more blocks.

“Oh, no,” I pleaded. “You can’t mean them. Not them!”

“They’re great,” Meg insisted.

“No, they are not great! They’re awful!”

“Maybe don’t tell them that,” Meg said, then she threw the coin into the street and yelled in Latin, “Stop, O Chariot of Damnation!”





CALL ME SUPERSTITIOUS. IF YOU’RE GOING to hail a chariot, you should at least try for one that doesn’t have damnation right there in the name.

Meg’s coin hit the pavement and disappeared in a flash. Instantly, a car-size section of asphalt liquefied into a boiling pool of blood and tar. (At least that’s what it looked like. I did not test the ingredients.) A taxi erupted from the goo like a submarine breaking the surface. It was similar to a standard New York cab, but gray instead of yellow: the color of dust, or tombstones, or probably my face at that moment. Painted across the door were the words GRAY SISTERS. Inside, sitting shoulder to shoulder across the driver’s bench, were the three old hags (excuse me, the three mature female siblings) themselves.

The passenger-side window rolled down. The sister riding shotgun stuck out her head and croaked, “Passage? Passage?”

She was just as lovely as I remembered: a face like a rubber Halloween mask, sunken craters where her eyes should have been, and a cobweb-and-linen shawl over her bristly white hair.

“Hello, Tempest.” I sighed. “It’s been a while.”

She tilted her head. “Who’s that? Don’t recognize your voice. Passage or not? We have other fares!”

“It is I,” I said miserably. “The god Apollo.”

Tempest sniffed the air. She smacked her lips, running her tongue over her single yellow tooth. “Don’t sound like Apollo. Don’t smell like Apollo. Let me bite you.”

“Um, no,” I said. “You’ll have to take my word for it. We need—”

“Wait.” Meg looked at me in wonder. “You know the Gray Sisters?”

She said this as if I’d been holding out on her—as if I knew all three founding members of Bananarama and had not yet gotten Meg their autographs. (My history with Bananarama—how I introduced them to the actual Venus and inspired their number one–hit cover of that song—is a story for another time.) “Yes, Meg,” I said. “I am a god. I know people.”

Tempest grunted. “Don’t smell like a god.” She yelled at the sister on her left: “Wasp, take a gander. Who is this guy?”

The middle sister shoved her way to the window. She looked almost exactly like Tempest—to tell them apart, you’d have to have known them for a few millennia, which, unfortunately, I had—but today she had the trio’s single communal eye: a slimy, milky orb that peered at me from the depths of her left socket.

As unhappy as I was to see her again, I was even more unhappy that, by process of elimination, the third sister, Anger, had to be driving the taxi. Having Anger behind the wheel was never a good thing.

“It’s some mortal boy with a blood-soaked bandana on his head,” Wasp pronounced after ogling me. “Not interesting. Not a god.”

“That’s just hurtful,” I said. “It is me. Apollo.”

Meg threw her hands up. “Does it matter? I paid a coin. Can we get in, please?”

You might think Meg had a point. Why did I want to reveal myself? The thing was, the Gray Sisters would not take regular mortals in their cab. Also, given my history with them, I thought it best to be up-front about my identity, rather than have the Gray Sisters find out halfway through the ride and chuck me out of a moving vehicle.

“Ladies,” I said, using the term loosely, “I may not look like Apollo, but I assure you it’s me, trapped in this mortal body. Otherwise, how could I know so much about you?”

“Like what?” demanded Tempest.

“Your favorite nectar flavor is caramel crème,” I said. “Your favorite Beatle is Ringo. For centuries, all three of you had a massive crush on Ganymede, but now you like—”

“He’s Apollo!” Wasp yelped.

“Definitely Apollo!” Tempest wailed. “Annoying! Knows things!”

“Let me in,” I said, “and I’ll shut up.”

That wasn’t an offer I usually made.